


entropy

by popocco



Category: Gintama
Genre: Ableist Language, Eye Trauma, Gen, Introspection, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, kind of??? i don't actually contradict anything concrete, so hang in there, the ending is hopeful and i have more to write about this guy yet, the roughest i've done yet, this is a rough one folks, trigger warnings listed in the opening notes but among them are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:36:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27475129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/popocco/pseuds/popocco
Summary: Takasugi Shinsuke, and the tragedy of being alive.*POST-CANON, VAGUE SPOILERS*
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	entropy

**Author's Note:**

> hoo. phew. phewwww.
> 
> there's not actually much i can preface this with before i get to the content warnings, which should be CAREFULLY heeded, so i might babble for a bit:
> 
> it's more personally important to me than almost anything else about gintama's canon ending, which i have no end of VERY mixed feelings about, that takasugi be allowed to keep living as himself, with his memories, and finally get a shot leading a life with even any tiny measure of peace to it. i do think what sorachi added in there is vague enough to extrapolate this out of, so that's what i've done, but there's... a lot. there's still a lot to account for, that needs to be accounted for, so that's what this fanfic is. it's a really, really tough read, and it was a really tough write. but the ending is hopeful, because it just HAS to be, so keep that in mind if you think you feel ok getting into this.
> 
> that being said- BIG ol list of trigger warnings:
> 
> \- suicidal thoughts and behaviours, is the main one, in spades  
> \- physical self-harm  
> \- eye trauma  
> \- ableist language about intelligence  
> \- internalized ableism
> 
> it's not a long list especially but please take it into careful consideration!
> 
> beyond that, uhh. my commentary ends here. i'm actually quite nervous about posting this, because i've put a lot of myself into it, in some rather vulnerable places. so it's sorta staggeringly meaningful for me to have written and shared it. it's important i guess. if this manages to be important to you, for any of the same reasons it is for me, then i'd be happy with that

Takasugi had always felt deeply certain, ever since the day his left eye closed forever, that “hope” was something he was altogether finished experiencing.

He never lost the capacity for many similar, or tangentially related feelings. For example his sense of expectation, or motivation, or anticipation. His _impatience,_ if anything, only grew more unchecked by the moment, and grew, and grew and grew and grew, until it started truly making a mess of all his most carefully-laid plans. Even then he never lost his desire to take action, or for results. For a conclusion.

For _the_ conclusion.

Hope, though? Until not so long ago, the mere notion itself of feeling _hope_ would have made him laugh out loud, or made him angry enough to cause a person some lasting physical harm, or both.

Everything he could ever have once wished for, against reason, or probability, or luck, or in desperate prayer, he had already seen die before his very sight. Nothing would bring it back. Takasugi gained a purpose, that day, but he never harboured any illusion that fulfilling it would reward him with anything.

The wrongs the world had to answer for would see bloody retribution- he’d carve it out with his bare hands if he had to. And when all the digging, and scraping, and clawing finally broke off all his nails, then his digits, and then finally his limbs, he’d still lunge after that pound of flesh with his bare teeth.

He would kill every last person responsible for Yoshida Shouyou’s death, and anybody who got in the way of that, and then he himself would die. That was the only possible outcome, from the very precise second in which that sword began to swing across the throat of the first and only man to ever love and teach him as a parent _should._

Reaching that moment of balance, when Takasugi’s weary body was finally permitted to purge the spectre of hatred and vengeance that carried it onwards those twelve years since the day he _truly_ died, would be nothing more than the scientific process of entropy. One final, insignificant correction taking place. The scale righting itself back to zero at last.

Nothing to look forward to. A simple, unchanging natural fact, like needing oxygen to breathe.

Takasugi doesn’t live in this belief. But he does continue to exist, moment to moment, day to day. And he does _believe,_ that when the borrowed time he’s been using runs dry, and the warm, quiet dark takes the parts of him it didn’t have room for back then, he won’t greet it with relief or happiness. He’ll simply keep moving forward to where he’s meant to be, like he always has been.

He discovers, abruptly, that he was _wrong._

Death finally comes, more slowly than he might’ve expected it to, and in more comfort. In better company. Death finally does find him, and take him, just like it was always supposed to.

It finds him lacking.

It spits him back out again, disgusted.

It’s then that Takasugi learns, with mortifying, absolute clarity, that he never stopped knowing how to hope at all.

He was hoping all along- desperately, fervently, pleading on his hands and knees- that death would _want_ him. That it would keep him.

He is made to linger, again, against every bloody guiding principle that the universe is supposed to operate upon. He lingers, in torturous, eternal witness to every single one of the failings that should have finally delivered him to oblivion.

There is a gap, in Takasugi’s memory.

He starkly remembers the colour of that sunset. Bright, deep, orange-red in the corner of his eye, still somehow clinging to the edges of all that starry emptiness behind Gintoki’s head.

The oozing, seeping ache all over, from the last of all that tainted blood finally leaving him be inside his own mind again. He remembers that, too. He remembers the peace he felt, then, for the first time since he was born. The hypocrisy of that.

He remembers what he asked for, with those difficult, penultimate breaths, and how his mouth felt smiling around that request. He wishes he didn’t.

Takasugi remembers, with considerably more difficulty, fighting to keep his eye open for just a moment longer, because he couldn’t see very well anymore but he _could_ feel the hot, salty rain that had started to fall on to his face, and he thinks he must have had a thing or two to say in complaint of it.

He has a vague, unhappy recollection of the grip supporting his upper back and shoulders, and how it trembled.

And then he remembers the muzzy pain of waking up, his returning awareness of himself and little else, barely _even_ himself- of feeling his bones and muscles and flesh growing faster with every passing second, accelerating.

This is unclear too- even the shrieking, incessant agony of his body, wrenching itself forward through its own re-development, is both sluggish and blindingly vivid for what feels an immeasurable length of time. Snippets of muddied, suffocating immobility. The illogical terror, and fully matured feeling of rage that this brings. Beneath it all, the faint knowledge that his mind should not be capable in the first place of observing and tracking these phenomena even to the incomplete degree that it does.

Violently, suddenly, Takasugi is more or less back in control of his body again. He already knows what’s happened.

He knew the very instant his heart began beating again, probably. He wonders quietly when his heart, specifically, formed, this second time around. Before his brain? Which one is responsible for “him”, then? Which one is the _physical_ container, for the entire wretched lifetime he’s been doomed to, now, shackled to, dragging on behind him?

None of it makes a lick of logical or scientific sense, obviously. This is what happened to Shouyou-sensei. It’s happening to him, now. That’s all.

It _already_ happened. He remembers the story Gintoki told him- all of it.

He remembers… all of it.

The fact that he exists now, still, and remembers, is proof that it’s simply done.

Again- _again,_ and isn’t that just hysterical? How could this happen for a second time, when the first, it didn’t even leave enough of him left to feel betrayal? When did the festering tumour, the cancer, that grew from the hollowed rotting remains of Takasugi Shinsuke, mutate to such a mass that it reclaimed even some mockery of dignity to be trodden upon?

Again.

Again, the choice has already been made for him, and he remains.

Again, for the second time, instead of letting him die when he should have, somebody else got to decide that he would stay.

He’ll never get to choose for himself, now, will he? It’s already over. It already happened. He’s truly stuck, pinned again to a single point in time, for the _rest_ of time, like a swallowtail in a display case.

He’s angry.

He’s so angry he could scream, and wail, and tear himself and everything around him apart, to miserable little pieces, over and over and over and over and over, even to the foregone conclusion that it won’t work and he’ll still just be here.

But he’s already done all of that, hasn’t he? He did it all, until the day he really died, and this is where it got him.

That’s the worst part, maybe: realizing he really was _alive,_ all these years. That he’s still really alive, and still _feels_ alive, against every wish that he wouldn’t even be able to.

That he _got_ to die- and that it didn’t last.

Sensei got his wish finally granted in the end.

Takasugi will never have the same wish granted, now.

And how fitting! Only to realize for the first time that he _had_ such a wish, such a pathetic vestige of “humanity”, after every possibility of having it fulfilled has been snatched from his very fingers. After he’s stopped being technically, scientifically human at all.

Not that he ever measured up to a whole human being in the first place. It was always there, he’s come to learn. The beast, the monster, whatever name you could give it- it was inside him all along, before that day it was drawn howling to the surface of him. He always had it, the capacity for such pitiful anger and despair and destruction.

Hah. Perfect, isn’t it? That he finally has the body to match. Enough to make Takasugi laugh. Enough to make him cry.

He doesn’t do either of those things, though.

Pointlessly cruel of him, of course, to let Matako keep fearing every day that there’s nothing of him at all occupying the tiny creaking body he’s once again come to inhabit. Petulant. Childish, even. For the time being he _is_ a child again, physically, so he allows himself his pointless little vengeance against the fact that even _now_ she refuses to let him go.

She talks to him frequently, though it’s with the obvious insecurity of someone doubting they have an audience. About none of the same things she used to, naturally. There’s no Kiheitai anymore. Just one single, young, far too weary-looking lady and her… what. Her _ward?_

It’s ludicrous. Every single facet of it is some perverse farce, and Takasugi refuses to take part. The wanted criminal gunman, living her modest, hidden life out in some deep country burg, in a single-room hut with six tatami and a cooking hearth and nothing else. Coming home from what meagre odd jobs and favours she can scrounge together without drawing too much attention. Learning to fish, she tells him one day, sheepishly laughing at her own poor aptitude with a rod, with none of the obnoxious vigour she would’ve, should’ve. All to provide for the unresponsive, unnatural little freak of a boy she has _no_ proof he resides within.

It’s sickening. It’s infuriating. It’s his own doing entirely, and it makes him feel completely out of his mind with anger. The fact that Matako, a woman grown and capable, free to do so much more than entertain this _pathetic_ play at, at _family-_ at what some lost little girl who lost her _real_ family, then attached herself to the worst fucking people in the universe for want of any other immediate option, that she _thinks_ is family- refuses to abandon it.

And for what? What possible fucking emotional reward could she see in this? For working her fingers rough, for walking and labouring all day till her back has already started to bend a bit, for starving herself some nights when she _knows_ beyond doubt that this body of his already continues to grow and stretch as a matter of automatic course now, without needing a single thing to nourish it- that he _can’t_ starve to death, not anymore- What reason at all could Matako have, to keep living this thankless and meagre life, when Takasugi does nothing and _feels_ nothing thankful towards it?

Does she think that one day, she’ll wake up to that old wavering mirage of charisma Takasugi used to put on sometimes? All back to normal, like he was before he singularly ruined everything they’d been working for with his own two hands. That he’ll finally date, or marry her, or whatever the fuck she thought she wanted- he _knew,_ obviously, the entire time, about the foolish little infatuation she bore- ignored it for everyone’s goddamn sake- Does she think he’ll fall in love with her, like in some insipid TV drama about an amnesiac and his minder?

Takasugi knows that she doesn’t. He can’t pretend not to know, anymore. That’s what makes him the angriest: the knowledge that Matako simply does these things because she cares about him. The knowledge that she cares about _him._ The… the mere possibility, of him.

Everything, _everything_ makes Takasugi so, so angry.

He doesn’t know if it shows on his face at all, the way it used to back when he was actually a boy of so few years, and he doesn’t care. Because he refuses to let it make him speak, or do anything at all, beyond manipulating his awkward small body into performing whatever basic few tasks keep Matako reassured that he’s capable of sitting alone all day without endangering himself.

He will not _reward_ what she has done. He will not acknowledge the life she has confined herself to, for his sake, or for her own bloody sake, because all of this is wrong to begin with.

It’s all wrong.

The fact that he’s alive. The fact that he can’t die. The fact that sensei got to die, in the end, and then _dared_ to choose on Takasugi’s own fucking behalf that he would survive longer than _all_ the other people he’s ever been stupid enough to love, too. That he’s already seeing Matako age beyond her years right in front of him, _because_ of him.

Takasugi can understand better, now, what could’ve driven Utsuro down the path he took. He already did understand to begin with. He already reconciled, long, _long_ ago, with the reality that killing was the only course left to him, and probably never bore anything but hatred towards sapient life at large even since he was a child. He was already broken to begin with, he’s started to think.

The logic, the justice, the concept of “good” in the world itself- Takasugi has already seen those shed their lying skins before. He already sees the truth underneath. He’s already waged his war. He’s gotten tired.

As angry as he is, he’s even more tired, and with his pride shattered and trampled upon to such an extent as this current state of existence, he sees no benefit to pretending he isn’t.

Maybe it’s as simple as that- maybe _that’s_ the reason.

He doesn’t talk to Matako, or look at Matako, because he’s tired. He doesn’t do anything all day long but sit on the ragged old tatami of this miserable shit heap of a house, feeling his body keening and stretching and hurting as it races towards its new default template, its terminus, because he’s tired.

He’s just tired. He’s been tired for a very long time.

He’s tired of living. He’s tired of dying. He’s tired of being cared for. He’s tired of caring.

Just… tired.

Did sensei think he was saving Takasugi, when he enacted this final, ruthless cruelty borne from that compassionate heart of his? When he did whatever he did, to grab Takasugi’s exhausted, ugly, beaten-up shredded dreg of a “soul”, and tied it to some dissolving hunk of cursed meat?

He was always so _stupid._ He never fucking figured it out, did he, that he already saved all of Takasugi that was salvageable in the first place, when he let him come to his cruddy little school in the woods.

He already did enough. It was already enough.

Everyone’s already done enough, but they keep _trying,_ when all that fucking does is cause nothing but pain.

Sensei. Zura. Gintoki. Bansai. Matako.

Over and over, all of them trying, sticking their noses in, holding their hands out, offering what Takasugi doesn’t _want._ When he doesn’t want to give anything back. When he has nothing _to_ give, or know how to give it. When all he wants to do is take, because the only “love” he _knows_ is taking.

He can finally admit that he loves, now, after he’s died again and again, every day of his life just dying and being reborn into the same freakish gnashing _thing_ that he is, and it’s never _stuck._ When he’s just too fucking tired to pretend he doesn’t, anymore, because there’s no point to pretending.

But so what? It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t change anything, because everything he feels is wrecked by the same frantic, aimless fear and loathing it always has been.

The love he feels for his father, his _real_ father, but probably also the first one who cast him out as a child, even.

The love he feels for the pair of complete irredeemable dipshits he grew up with. Who he could never bring himself to throw away, not even after all the misery, and hatred, and strife that ruined their friendship.

The love he feels for the fools who chose at every turn to stand by him, as he plunged them all into bloody ruin and damnation. The only one of them who remains now, ruining her own life further to keep _on_ standing by him.

All this love is just as hideous and ruthless as every other thing Takasugi taints the world with through his presence in it. Acknowledging it has brought him no peace, and will bring nobody else peace. It will bring nothing to anybody, because he will not share it. He’s never given anything to anybody else, and this too Takasugi will keep caged inside him where it’s always thrashed and raged and torn itself to shreds.

The only thing sensei did, “saving” Takasugi one last time, was fail to rub out a malignant blight on the earth where all the people he loved still live. He was really an idiot, right to the last, and Takasugi would still burn the whole thing down to white crumbling ashes if he’d left any of his work unfinished. He probably _will,_ in the end, even after everything he’s already done. Such an obvious mistake it makes him sick. How could he not see? How did he just not _get_ it?

Saving Shouyou-sensei _meant_ killing him, so how, how could he _still_ not understand, even now, that he should have let Takasugi die too?

Takasugi understands, he _does_ get it- that when you love someone, sometimes you _have_ to kill them. That it’s the only choice.

He just refused to see it. Until the very, very end, sensei kept pretending, didn’t he? Playing dumb with a tranquil smile in that maddening way he always did, just to get under Takasugi’s skin. That Takasugi isn’t, hasn’t always been, someone who just _should_ die, for the sake of anything left that’s halfway good at all in the whole wretched fucking universe.

And he can’t, now. That’s just the reality of it.

Fine, then. He’s already been doing this for a long time.

Living, barely, knowing that everything in the world is wrong and terrible, and for no real reason. Surviving within it, miserable, refusing to accept it. Refusing to adapt. The world itself is wrong, and terrible, and nothing within that _is_ acceptable. It’s unacceptable. He should not _have_ to adapt, or change, to fit into the world that has done nothing but take from him for his entire life. So he will not.

Takasugi will never accept it. So the world will never accept him, either, then.

That’s how it’s always been. That’s how it just is, whether or not that’s how it “should” be. Thinking about how the world should be is painful, so he doesn’t. He learned how to stop.

He’s familiar with this. He’s so familiar it hurts, always. He’s tired.

He’s tired, and angry, and none of that alone will change anything, and never could.

So he keeps living. He has no choice but to keep living, the way he has been, apart from everything and everyone in that world that he can never accept.

The days pass like this, similar to how they always did. It’s all the same, really. The similarity is one of the things he hates the most. In his “first” life, the one that should have been the only one, that was already too long by half, he busied himself with all manner of petty diversions and schemes. But with the varnish stripped off, it was all just the same slow cloying, crawling agony. It’s so obvious to him, now.

If Shouyou-sensei is watching, somehow, from some optimistic abstraction of Heaven or other, Takasugi bitterly hopes that he’s disappointed in what he sees. He wants sensei to regret this awful, unfair, hysterically stupid final decision of his.

He doesn’t, though. He’s just matter recycled back into the ecosystem, now, and doesn’t think or feel anything anymore, because he’s dead. He doesn’t exist. Takasugi is furiously jealous, of that.

The days are all so similar that they could be months- Takasugi does not make any effort to measure them- so it comes as a brutally sudden realization to him, one night.

That his left eye is still shut, marred and useless inside its socket.

He never even noticed.

It was the one thing that felt _right,_ about him, about any of this. He’s already spent so long seeing without it that it felt… normal.

Seized with frantic nausea he sits up, shedding the patchwork futon Matako made for him before she made her own, his arms and legs buzzing numb and cold. They still work, and they still listen to him- they take him well enough over to the shabby chest of drawers in the opposite corner, and his fingers, even, cooperate around the handle of the simple paring knife from the top left.

It looks, feels, gigantic in his tiny little child’s hand. It’s all so absurd he wants to laugh till his face splits.

Independent of anything Takasugi wants or doesn’t want, with a crystal clear and beautiful sense of urgency rooted in nothing but unbiased compulsion- simply because he has to do it- he points the tip of the knife to his closed left eyelid, and drives the whole length of the metal into the socket.

Aah. Ahhhh, he forgot. He forgot, didn’t he? He remembers, now.

Maybe he’s pushed it too deep, started to hit his brain- he doesn’t feel much of anything. He’s aware, physically, of the viscera wetting his hands and his face. He can feel his expression screwed up in terrible pain, his teeth clenching, the shocked sweat oozing from his pores. But time feels slowed to a crawl, somehow, and he’s displaced. It strikes him as pointless. He already has so much time, now. The rest of the time in the universe. He doesn’t need any more.

He doesn’t need it. He doesn’t need any of it.

There’s not much light on the inside of this tiny decrepit room of a building, but the sky must be mostly cloudless and the moon large, because Takasugi is aware suddenly of that small amount of light disappearing.

Oh… he’s woken Matako. Stupid. He should have gone outside.

She’s kneeling in front of him, at eye level. He can hear her, now, but he can see nothing. She’s sobbing, loudly, and her hand is truly enormous around his tiny tiny wrist.

“Please,” she’s begging him, repeating over and over, her other hand gripping tight to Takasugi’s shoulder, as she tries to coax away his grip on the paring knife. “Please, please stop this- _Stop it—”_

She easily pries his fingers off the handle. It’s cartoonish how small and weak his hand is. Pathetic.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she babbles, her voice sounding nasal and soggy from all the crying, and he feels through the knife still stuck into his socket that she tries to touch it for a moment. “I can’t, I just can’t- I’m so so sorry- Shinsuke--”

It’s fine, though. He can already hear and feel his whole ocular cavity mending, with disgusting little burbles, pushing the foreign object out of it with sheer regenerative strength. Not much time at all passes, Matako’s sobbing and hiccupping and apologizing so close and loud in the total darkness of her shadow over him, until the knife just comes completely free and hits the floor.

Takasugi’s left eye is still shut. He brings up the palm of his hilariously small little hand and takes a long time just touching the lid, recognizing the presence of the completely useless organ behind it, and knowing with numb absolute certainty that this is just the natural state of things.

As if he’d been born with it.

He supposes he has been, now.

He’s so… tired.

He’s tired.

Tired of making Matako cry. He hates it. He won’t, anymore. He’s had enough.

He can’t stop living. He can’t stop dying. He can’t stop being angry, and tired, and broken, but he can stop making Matako cry.

She’s pulled all of him into a tight, stifling embrace, and her tears and snot have been making his shoulder all wet. She’s still saying little things between her sobs, but they always come back to: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry- I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Takasugi says, and the sound of his own voice is shocking. It’s small, of course- tiny. High, like a child’s would be. He knew it would be, but hearing it for the first time since-- it’s still an unpleasant surprise.

What’s one more unpleasant surprise, at this point?

Matako is surprised too. She’s pulled back far enough to look into Takasugi’s face, and understand that he’s really the one using the mouth on it to speak to her now. He can only just make out the way her own mouth twists and pulls before she dives back over and around him again, hugging tighter than before, crying louder even, more explosively.

Well. That’s not what he wanted to happen.

He won’t tell her to stop- that’s never useful or helpful. Besides, he’d rather not hear his own squeaky little undeveloped vocal chords do their worst if he can help it. It shouldn’t take too long for them to mature with the rest of this… awful, inhuman, unkillable body he’s stuck with now.

Still… there’s a balance Takasugi has left unaddressed for far too long. For more than a whole lifetime already, if he’s about to start counting those.

“Thank you,” he tells Matako, in a slight lull between the shuddering sobs encircling his entire body. As expected, the feel and sound of the words coming out of him is hideously annoying and hateful. So he won’t add what for. There’s far too much to keep track of anyways.

A lot more squeezing and crying is the result of his words. Takasugi doesn’t feel better, having expressed even a slight measure of gratitude. Not in this way, in this situation.

He doesn’t feel grateful for much of anything. He’s not grateful to be alive. He’s not grateful to Matako, for doing all the things she’s done for him.

Effort deserves recognition. That’s all.

Matako speaks to him the most she ever has, that night, still crying, still squeezing him so tightly they both might break, about everything. How scared, and worried, and tired she is too. The most she’s ever shared with him.

Takasugi isn’t happy or grateful to receive all this, either. He’s received enough already. He’s had enough. It’s already enough.

But he still does receive it. All he knows how to do is take, after all. From the beginning, all he’s ever understood about living is how to take from people. All he’s ever understood about being alive is being taken from.

He doesn’t know if he has anything _worth_ taking, anymore, but he’s still here. So there must be, somehow, even if he can’t find it within himself.

He has no choice but to remain, so he’ll remain. He’ll keep on taking and taking and taking.

Maybe he’ll take up on that offer he still remembers, one day not too far off, for some drinks over in Edo.

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally the first part of two in something that's become a different project now, that i've already mentioned elsewhere, about sakamoto and takasugi specifically together post-canon. but i couldn't figure out a way to naturally bridge this and that together, and i think this deserves to stand on its own anyways
> 
> (note: i know takechi is technically still alive at the end but he's never been anything other than a vehicle for a truly repulsive brand of running joke, and contributes no meaningful emotional storytelling as far as i'm concerned, and has nothing BESIDES existing in awful awful taste to begin with that's worth trying to cherry pick at lol. eat shit sorachi)


End file.
